Hut site, Coumreagh, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Coumreagh, Co. Kerry

On the slopes above Coumreagh, in the south Kerry uplands of the Iveragh Peninsula, a ring of irregular stones sits in the grass, barely breaking the surface.

It is a single course high, measuring just over seven metres across, the wall half a metre thick at most. Easy to step over, easy to miss entirely, it is the kind of thing that reads as almost nothing until you understand what it once was: the ground plan of a dwelling, the lowest surviving layer of a dry-stone hut whose upper walls and roof have long since collapsed or been carted away.

Circular stone hut sites of this kind are found scattered across the upland areas of Kerry and the wider south-west of Ireland, and they tend to resist precise dating without excavation. Some belong to the early medieval period, when small farming communities worked seasonal pastures at altitude, a practice known as booley farming or transhumance. Others are older still. What survives at Coumreagh is modest even by the standards of such sites: a diameter of 7.35 metres would have enclosed a reasonably workable interior space, enough for shelter, sleep, and basic domestic activity, but the wall, preserved to only a single course, tells us almost nothing about how high it once stood or what form the roof took. The site lies roughly 120 metres south of another recorded monument in the same area, suggesting this stretch of upland carries a broader pattern of early activity rather than a single isolated incident of habitation.

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Pete F
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